CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phplaravel
Christian LSANGOLA
Christian LSANGOLA

Reputation: 3307

exists method does not work as expected in laravel for checking row existence

I'm working on a little rest API,and in my controller a json response works only if the $object->exists() returns 1 but for any other cases it sends errors Here is my code :

 public function show($id)
    {
        $category=Category::find($id);
        return response()->json(
          ($category->exists()?$category:["message"=>"not found"])
        );
    }

When the category is found i get row back in a json format and it doesn't work for the false case. What i wanted to do first was that in a case of an error to return message and code 404 code status like the following code:

public function show($id)
    {
        $category=Category::find($id);
        return response()->json(
          ($category->exists()?$category:(["message"=>"not found"],404))
        );
    }

But nothing worked either while my code seems well written and i'm getting the exact same problem with the destroy method:

 public function destroy($id)
    {
      $category=Category::find($id);
      if($category->exists()){
        $category->delete();
        return response()->json(array("message"="category deleted","success"=>true));
      }
        return response()->json(array("message"=>"Not found"),404);
    }

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1275

Answers (3)

Travis Britz
Travis Britz

Reputation: 5552

What i wanted to do first was that in a case of an error to return message and code 404 code status like the following code

The findOrFail() method exists for exactly this case:

public function show($id)
{
    $category = Category::findOrFail($id);
    return $category;
}

In the event that no model was found, findOrFail() will throw a ModelNotFoundException which causes a 404 to be returned.

Upvotes: 1

prolific
prolific

Reputation: 775

exists() is a builder method and you are executing it on a model instance.

As you are already fetching the model instance from the database so you can instead check if it is empty or not. You can do something like:

empty($category) ? ["message"=>"not found"] : $category

Upvotes: 0

Jerodev
Jerodev

Reputation: 33186

Using Category::find($id); will return a Category object when the record actually exists in the database. However, if the record does not exist, it will return null. Because of this, you are trying to call the function exists() on null which is not possible.

It's better to check if the variable has the value null or use a null coalescing operator if you are on php7.

$category = Category::find($id);
return response()->json(
    $category ?? ["message" => "not found"], 
    404
);

Upvotes: 4

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